Newmania, the WI idea is flawed because it promotes prostitution and if you spoke to many women in this trade, they are in it against their will or because there is no alternative.

What are you talking about? First, I have known a couple of women who worked as prostitutes, and read the blogs of a couple more, and they have all done it for one reason: the large amounts of money to be made. And that is their decision.

That may not be a "majority", but there are people who do it willingly and there always have been.

As for those who are forced into it... I’m sorry, but I must have missed the meeting where kidnap, rape, blackmail, false imprisonment and assault were made legal.

How would you feel if it was your wife, your sister, your daughter?

Do you seriously think, Ellie, that we should make policy from such an emotive standpoint? If you do, you're a moron.

But since you ask, were my sister or daughter in prostitution, I would rather that it was in a safe, licensed brothel where she could have regular check-ups, than out of the street with all the risks of assault, drugs and murder that go with it; coupled, of course, with the trepidation of going to a doctor with a medical problem for fear that the doctor will turn her in to the police.

If it were my wife, I'm afraid that I rather think that divorce would be on the cards. And then the above paragraph would apply. Probably. Depending how much I hated her by the end of it...

David, you say, “As for believing that we shall ever completely eradicate prostitution: how absurd!”

You will never completely eradicate prostitution, Ellie; just accept that, will you? We haven’t been able to do so in the last few hundred years, just as we have not been able to eradicate drugs.

This is because some men want to buy sex and some women want to sell it and, as long as it is a voluntary agreement, why the fuck shouldn't they? Who are you to impose your morals on other people—got a monopoly on being fundamentally and intrinsically right, have you?

Don’t you feel innocent women should be protected from those who force them into this, like the extract I quoted demonstrates?

As for innocent women being forced into this, as I pointed out above, kidnap, rape, blackmail, false imprisonment and assault ARE ALREADY ILLEGAL, as is "living off immoral earnings". Get it?

You may not like prostitution, Ellie, but—as with drugs—by far the most damage is done by making it illegal*.

And if you are going to argue against prostitution, at least try to realise that prostitution and forced prostitution are two different things entirely and we already have numerous laws against the latter.

What actually needs to happen—and I'm fucking sick of repeating this—is to enforce the laws that we already have, not to make yet more discriminatory laws that will not, in any case, be enforced but which almost certainly will, given NuLabour's track record, be used for some other reason entirely.

Fucking hellski. Some people...

* I know that prostitution is not illegal; living off immoral earnings, however, is and thus prostitution is effectively criminalised.

I had hoped that this kind of one-dimensional, intellectual dwarfism was peculiar to neo-lab and that the Tories could be relied upon to exclude such miserably shallow-minded characters from their ranks - it seems that my hopes were both premature and naive.

The fundamental problem with such people seems to be that they are incapable of distinguishing between the words "permit" and "endorse" or "tollerate" and "encourage". Ordinarily, this would be a skill that could be expected of GCSE english language students and often well before that through the natural acquisition of language but there are more than a few "liberal" politicos who seem to have regressed to a pre-cognitive level of conceptual fusion in a number of important areas.

Prohibition of pornography, drugs and prostitution has never worked, will not work now and will never work in any society which would be recognisable to present day humans. Seymore is just another bleak, mediocre hack getting a rise and some publicity out of adopting a totally counter-productive and yet, at least to here own mind, attractive policy of prohibition and/or censorship. For herself and her supporters, there seems to be the attraction of wielding power (a kind of "killjoy" factor, stop enjoying yourself I say) coupled with a need to be seen to stand in opposition of a thing that they do not personally approve of.

I am a confessed hypocrite in this regard (a sexual nimby you might say). I do not "like" prostitution, I would not employ the services of a prostitute, I would strongly oppose any family member or friend from becomming involved in prostitution (even as a client) and I would be extremely put out if my local area became a red-light district. And yet, prostitution is a fact of life and I would say it is better that someone do it than it be made illegal. It cannot be legislated out of existence - any attempt to do so will imbue an already sleazy profession with an even more potent air of desperation and criminality.

My only direct exposure to prostitution (and it was a very unpleasant wake up call at that) was when a friend of mine became friend/boyfriend to a prostitute. This woman had clearly been manipulated and forced into it and she was an absolute wreck, both mentally and physically - drug addiction was a huge factor and in the end she died of causes unknown (unknown to me at any rate - the flow of information was characterised by and almost unbelievably high level of lies and deceit). This was very much at the "lower working class" end of the the spectrum but I would advise anyone against harbouring any illusions about what goes on behind the scenes in "the business". That said, given that it's inevitable, it should be placed on a proper legal footing so that hardcore pimps can be excluded from the process and proper medical checks can be put in place - sure, there is no getting away from the fact that this is would be, to some extent, an endorsement of the practice and that an increase in the level of "uptake" would bring women into it that would have otherwise stayed out but it's the lesser of two evils by the widest possible margin.

Just-say-no'ers are indulging in the worst kind of intellectual infantilism - moralising seems to be one of the few areas where one can get away with displaying a level of utterly contemptible ignorance without any fear of reproach or contradiction by ones peers. It's not like I expect them to be hard-headed or anything - just sensible would be fine!

I note with some satisfaction that she's not railing against bleeding-heart, scorn-worthy, half-assed, shit-thick, fuck-stick blog-mongs with less clue than a bucketload of hot, festering piss-soaked turds as to what policies might improve the lot of the masses - turkeys never vote for christmas eh Seymore?

As an aside, I though I'd mention the oft-implied truism that anti-this-that-and-the-other types are, with very few exceptions, clearly unsuited to be "employed" in the activities they are trying to suppress. I appreciate that this might seem like a slightly shallow observation to make but, beyond that, the correlation is very real and pronounced ("A bunch of fat, old skanks on their periods.", as Cartman famously said, or "I'm not getting any so you lot can swing too" as anyone else might put it).

A few points: As mjw points out, prostitution has been going on for thousands of years, and despite the efforts of the "PC" brigade, will continue for thousands more, unless humanity gets wiped out.

The Victorian's tried to ban prostitution due to their very highbrow morals: they failed. In fact, they failed so spectacularly that the Victorian era has the highest recorded levels of prostitution in history.

It boils down to this: people such as Ellie find prostitution offensive to their very sensitive morals. But morality (somewhat like common sense) is a social ideal, and can't be legislated.

Saying that Prostitution should be allowed to be practiced in a safe manner - i.e in a licenced brothel - seems illogical to me. We may as well assume that we will never be able to stamp out drink-driving, so we should create drink-driving lanes for them to drive on so that they don't hurt anyone.

As for DK using his experience of knowing a few prostitutes, well (as I'm sure he's aware) that is hardly a full-proof study into the reasons why people go into prostitution is it? The fact is, and this has been brought up in numerous studies and in the commons, is that the large majority of prostitutes who are trafficked into our country are there against their will, are young, and are unlikely to meet DK because they aren't allowed to leave the confines of the brothel.

As for DK's rant about making laws on the basis of morals, well is it not our morals which provide the framework for law and order in the first place?

For the sake of protecting the minority's right to prostitute themselves in a "voluntary agreement" over the safety of the majority which are either doing it because they have a drug addiction they cannot control, or because they are trafficked over here at the age of 16 (or younger) is crazy if you ask me. I'm quite willing to force a man who would usually seek assistance form a prostitute, to either pleasure himself or find someone in the lonely hearts, than sustain a practice which lets thousands of girls fall through the net each year, get beaten etc.. and never be found.

Also, even though we probably cannot stop prostitution form occurring everywhere without some kind of Orwellian dystopia, we can at the very least send a moral message to say that in a modern civilization, these practices shouldn't go unquestioned.

There is a need for differentiation between the different types of prostitution.

There is a fucking world of difference between a trafficked woman being held against her will and an intelligent educated middle class escort in the Belle du Jour mould. There is a world of difference between both of them and some heroin junkie selling herself for smack on street corners.

Trafficking of women needs to be stopped not because of anything to do with fucking prostitution but because the women are kidnapped and raped.

Street prostitution, where 90+% of prostitutes are drug addicts, needs to be challenged at every turn.

Every other form of prostitution, where an adult woman (and escorts are often well-educated) makes a choice to exchange her sexual servcies for money, quite frankly, needs to be left the fuck alone by interfering puritanical know-it-alls on both left and right.

Anonymous: As opposed to being sanctioned by pseudo-enlightened liberal know-it-alls such as yourself?

It's all opinion, and yours isn't the neutral/objective position and the rest extreme subjection. Besides, I found it amusing that you specified the standard of education, as if a sans-GCSE prostitute would be a different case, or indeed a candidate for legal discrimination.

However, "living off immoral earnings" is a law against pimping, ie living off another's prostitution, perhaps through having forced that person into that activity; it does not and is not meant to criminalise the prostitute acting of her own volition, nor her activity. It is quite legal to trouser cash for sexual intercourse - and HMRC will expect a cut. I know of what I speak.

Many people prostitute themselves metaphorically every day. The state - rightly - sees no distinction between the well-remunerated rental of vaginas for fucking strangers and the poorly-remunerated rental of hands that flip strangers' burgers. Both scenarios, if willing, are aspects of capitalism - "morality" can fuck off back to the Old Testament.

Fuck off, you retard. The point, which you would know if you weren't a drooling fuckwit, is that most women who choose to engage in prostitution are perfectly aware of what they're doing.

You and your pathetic ilk want to make these women into victims. You, you statist scum, want to make these women and their vaginas your personal property to do with as you will.

I make no apology for believing that women are intelligent enough to choose what to do with their own bodies, so why don't you just fuck right off and die of AIDS, you sad pathetic discharge from a syphillitic anus.

The central principles governing liberterian philosophy provide answers to these questions without resorting to moralistic navel gazing, which is essentially what is happening here. Your use of the strawman equivalencies to legalising drink driving does not apply as this poses decreasing the liberty of others at the expense of increased liberty for said drinkdriver; also, applying your logic to prostitution, if it is merely one way to obtain sex (as driving is one way to travel) then the equivalent in your arguement would be banning driving altogether (now THAT's a strawman arguement).

Whether you agree with prostitution or not is not the question here, what is is how we can reduce the impact this has on peoples liberty and freedoms - only extremely naive people believe that sex obtained by transfer of property can be abolished (it is the oldest profession in the world after all). What would be the best way to limit the damage associated with its status as a crime? i.e. drugs, organised crime, white slavery, kidnap etc. Legalising it and offering the same protections we enjoy in driving (from your drink drivers for example) is the best way forward.

The only real question here though is about how we behave towards charities and interest groups interested in getting people out of prostitution - for example would we abolish state funding of charities in this area (and all other areas for that matter) to give them equal footing with religious charities which are already disenfranchised in this way? Teen Challenge is a good example for prostitution and drug use here - it achieves a 70% success rate which crushes many state funded charities but is denied state funding because of its Christian policies.

Anonymous: I think that ironically, it's the purchasers/renters of prostitutes that want to make "vaginas [their] personal property to do with as [they] will" not as it were, those of us who oppose it.

I see you have twisted the argument into some sort of pro-feminist 'They are just as intelligent as us and I'm not going to apologise for thinking that'argument, which is funny because I never once alluded to the fact that women OR prostitutes are stupid or don't know what they are doing! Your argument is utterly ridiculous.

Although don't get me wrong... your swearing makes you quite hard in my opinion and I feel threatened by your agression.

tomrat247: The people who have had their liberty decreased are the large majority of the prostitutes themselves. Of course I agree that faith charities should be given every help in helping those who manage to escape prostitution, but the sad fact is that most young women don't escape and get moved around Europe being used. I make no apology for thinking that we should set a legal precedent against prostitution at the expense of the relatively few escorts who choose their profession, as it can only help in curtailing the traffikers.

Anonymous whoever you are - I love that you've bought into the Belle Du Jour myth of the well educated escort. Never mind that the 'author' may well be a man, this is a myth that has recently been enlarged by the Claires and Mirandas who sit in publishing houses.

The question is how can we ensure that those who wish to ply their trade have the control you think they have - and by control I mean safety, freedom from organised crime and brutality etc. You cannot be in control if you are afraid and unlike all those educated escorts you seem to know, a fair amount of these girls don't have the control.

Your mode of attack is misdirected; if you want to stop prostitution the best way to do so if to remove the demand for humans trafficked through illegal channels - given the chance most of these girls you mention would never end up in prostitution intentionally but as has been pointed out those who perpetrate this vile exploitation dont really care about what they want. Forcing these same animals to compete against perfectly legal channels for the sex trade would cause their businesses to dry up and for them to crawl under some other hole (the fewer holes the better to catch them under).

And for the record I dont want Faith groups to receive extra helpor funding - I want all charities to play on a level playing field so that Bottler, like his predecessor Bliar, isn't funding his mates in covert leftist lobby groups like common purpose.

The reason why we've been successful at significantly reducing the levels of drink-driving is because most drinkers (other than a few clowns who are so far gone as to fall outside of any kind of representative sample) are not actually in it to drink AND drive, they just want to drink. So it's no surprise that, in the face of sterner penalties and better enforcement, drinkers (for that is what they are at the end of the day) have quite sensibly opted to use taxis or take turns being the non-drinking driver on nights out. We're only asking them to adjust their travel arrangments, not whether they get drunk or not, or how drunk they get - lets face it, they can now get *really* drunk and end up in casualty on a stretcher - you need to wake up and smell the complexity of these issues.

The driving part is completely peripheral to the core "pleasure seeking act" or "addiction", whichever you prefer. And in support of this rather self-evident line of reasoning, you will no doubt be aware that attempts to stop people from actually drinking are rather less successful (like, hopeless in comparison). This is because such efforts are in direct conflict with the core needs of the drinker rather than some, admitedly important from a road safety perspective, but, utterly superfluous aspect of the desire to drink alchohol.

I am quite shocked to see that you haven't even grasped this fairly elementary flaw in your reasoning. The rest of your posting is essentially nothing but a rather round-about way of saying that you think some good will come of a more prohibitive legislative environment around prostitution and you justify this by saying that it will reduce the level of human misery associated with prostitution:

I almost feel that I'm wasting my time by pointing out the obvious in attempting to put you straight on this but it's important, to say the very least, so hopefully you might actually try to think about what I'm saying - you don't seem to have thought about what *you* are saying though so maybe this is a waste of time but you do claim to give a shit, so here's hoping:

You underestimate the level of criminality in the people who are currently servicing the "grey" prostitution economy that we do have. I agree with your assessment that there are a huge number of girls that are violently coerced into it and that DK's own experience is probably not to be taken as representative but the financial stakes are too high, the money to be made will not go away and there will still be those who will continue to commit all the acts of brutality which you claim to dislike so much regardless of the legal impediments - we're already well beyond the law and into the realms of a kind of "bonded slavery" in some cases and any kind of understanding of human nature will tell you that there is a long way to go in the downward direction before "bad people" start to run out of ideas for evil things to do. The key thing is that more prohibition would make it *really* illegal so the stakes are even higher and so will the pressure they apply to try and keep things secret and under control.

You fail to appreciate that this thing is will not going to go away regardless of what you do - it is *nothing* like drink-driving, not even slightly (as I have demonstrated). It is much more like a drug addiction for both the clients and the "pimps" - the girls are largely caught in the middle and often have few, if any, options.

I think I share your discomfort with the whole process but I honestly and truly believe that prohibition will make things even worse for the very people you claim to want to help - can you even imagine how tragic that would be? As the risk of offending you, you almost seem like some kind of made-to-order caricature of everything that I dislike about so-called liberal do-gooders who want a solution that has a certain moral clarity to it regardless if the likely cost to the supposed beneficiaries of your crusades. The only way you can support your stated course of action is to live in a pathogical state of denial as to the complexity of the issues and the very real possibility (as evidence by volumous history on the same and similar subjects) that your "solutions" might sow the very sorry and misery you claim to stand in opposition to.

You seem almost moronically ignorant of the basics of human psychology and the primality of the sex drive in motivating human actions - this is very sad indeed.

I am a firm advocate for legalisation because I think it's the lease-worst option by far. The best outcome I would hope for (and it's not actually that much of a pipe dream) is that legalised prostitution would undercut the dark side of the business (and all the things that you allude to) by making them unprofitable in the face of a "safe", legalised, regulated and inspected option. If there is a safe, legal option I think that most "clients" would opt for that - I just can't see any other way of improving the situation that will work - notions of the free market are essentially grounded in truths of human nature - this business will always exist as long as there is a desire on the part of men to seek sexual gratification and a shortfall in the opportunities to do so.

It almost seems like (secretly) one of the main objection of many people is that legalisation is not a stance that they are comfortable being associated with - far better (so the thinking seems to go) to be a whiter-than-white champion for abstinence and prohibition - a kind of simplistic cartoon-like philosophy of black vs. white and simple, uncomplicated answers - it's just such a crock of lame witted horseshit.

You didn't even bother to think about the drink-driving analogy so you've got a ways to go yet. I don't mean to be patronising, but that was a really dumb, lame-assed thing to come out with.

This is not going to go away - you claim to give a shit - try to think about it,

Duckman:Quite a lengthy response to my comment. The drink-driving analogy was a reaction to the type of attitude which says "well, people do it, they're gonna keep on doing it, so why don't we provide a place where they can do it in the best/safest possible circumstances". Sorry if it wasn't the most perfect example, but there is a rather large group of people who believe the same about drugs. The truth is that prostitution (like drugs) will always negatively effect more than the people involved, it is a fact that there is a general decline in areas where there is legalised prostitution, look at the parts of Amsterdam, the US, Australia and Germany where legalised prostitution exists. These brothels are not as safe as you would like to assume, the Guardian wrote an article and comissioned a book recently about the conditions in legalized brothels in the US, which I was quite surprised at thinking they would have a more liberal view of it, the conclusion using over 2 years of interviews and research, was that it opend the women to just as much assault and violence as an illegal brothel. If you can be bothered to read it, I'll post the link at the end of the post.

Instead of your supposed benefits, legalized or decriminalized prostitution industries are one of the root causes of sex trafficking. One argument for legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands was that legalization would help end the exploitation of desperate immigrant women trafficked for prostitution. A report done for the governmental Budapest Group stated that 80% of women in the brothels in the Netherlands are illegally trafficked from other countries. As early as 1994, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) stated that in the Netherlands alone, "nearly 70 per cent of trafficked women were from CEEC Central and Eastern European Countries]".

The link between legalization of prostitution and trafficking in Australia was recognized in the U.S. State Department's 1999 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. In the country report on Australia, it was noted that in the State of Victoria which legalized prostitution in the 1980s, "Trafficking in East Asian women for the sex trade is a growing problem" in Australia…lax laws - including legalized prostitution in parts of the country - make [anti-trafficking] enforcement difficult at the working level."

It seems strange to me that people would favour the decriminalising of prostitution whilst turning a blind eye to it's failure in the countries it has been implemented in... Could it be that you haven't actually researched this at all?

Another argument which is made again and again is that 70% of individuals in prostitution in the UK entered the trade before their 18th birthday, a high proportion of thaose before they were 16. Unless you are considering opening brothels for children, I assume the demand for underage prostitution will not dissipate.

And also, you come across as a total dick in your comments, you were right about you sounding sanctimonious and condescending, which is even more annoying when you factor in the reality that you know little about what you are talking.

Zoomraker - Quite. People trafficking is against the law. We don't need any more laws. It's already on the books. It's just that Britain is absolutely lawless and laws on the statute books aren't enforced, so, to make it look as though the government, not the criminals, are in control, they pass more legally illiterate laws that will never be enforced.

If David Cameron announced that one of the Tories' major priorities, on election, would be a review - with a view to repealing - every law passed by the socialists, that would be a winner. In fact, if they promised to come in with a JCB and haul them off wholesale and dump them in a landfill, that would be even more of a winner.

Pupazz writes: "The Victorian's tried to ban prostitution due to their very highbrow morals ...". (The Victorian's what, by the way?)

I believe you're wrong. I don't think they "tried to ban prostitution" at all. I think they tried to discourage it and set up homes for prostitutes and their illegitimate children. I dont know what a "highbrow moral" is, but the Victorians seem to have had a rather compassionate attitude to prostitution. They were strong Christians and felt that every living soul was salvageable.

Duckman writes: "I am a firm advocate for legalisation". Prostitution is legal already. Soliciting in public is not. Neither is kerb crawling. Prostitution itself is perfectly legal, as indeed it should be.

All prossies are not drug addicts and are quite often normal and happily married women. They do so of their own free will because it beats working in a factory for a pittance.

Rather than stopping adults make a free choice, we should be tackling the real problems, drugs, the people smugglers and others who force or pressure women into it.

Goverment instinct is always to to curtail our freedoms instead of taking some obvious effective measures. Publicity by a small charity enormously reduced the number of female drug mules from Jamaica, why is it so beyond the wit of our government to do something similar in Eastern Europe so these women are not conned? Why is it so difficult to set up an anonymous phone line so customers can report any concern that women may not be willing participants? Or have a PCSO drop in to massage parlours on odd occasions and make an assessment?

Other than the crimes DK mentions - which should be enforced better - is a prostitute forced into it? Throughout history people have rebelled against struggle and enforced activity, the history books full of their efforts. The fact that this rebellion is virtually non-existant speaks for itself, I think.

To take another angle, I find it ironic that this was arguably the first form of capitalism.

Duckman you boring pontificating time thief, I have just wasted my time trawling your gaseous preenathon and the only thing you say which bears the slightest further thought its that you know nothing about it.Why not leave it there , god knows what you are even trying to say. On the various figures quoted, they are of course fiction. No-one knows, if you look at the Guarduian article I originally quoted there is a discussion of the problem .

I fully endorse DK`s profoundly insightful estimation of my comment :),Why don`t we all go down to the Capricorn club in Russell Square and ask the ho`s?.

Prostitution has been a normal part of the human condition since we stood up on our hind legs and women who had lost their tribe, or had been cast out, offered sex to the man in charge of a cave that had a warm fire in it.

I think the "government" should stop fretting about it as they intend to legislate men out of existence anyway.

Oh yeah Verity, I think I read that in 'Cave Man Diaries'... YOU dumb skank. How the hell would any of us know if cave-women did that??? Is there a series of cave drawings depicting that series of events??? NO you stupid div.

The practise of a man offering food in exchange for sex is very old, and is recorded in pre-money societies still. Males share food with females with whom they hope to have sex with and who will bear their children. No surprise there. I also read, many years ago, a divorce case in which part of the man's case was that the wife only allowed him to make love if he had recently bought her something. A new fridge got him 20 minutes of sex, if memory serves. It would be unfair to call her a whore - but she was selling sex for certain.